Limbo’s ending: what does it all mean? The many theories

The ending of Limbo asked just as many questions as it answered. With the help …

Limbo, on the Xbox Live Arcade, is an interesting game that shows just how far you can push the boundaries with a smaller, downloadable release. The title features a young man who suffers innumerable violent deaths through the course of the game, and before the credits roll you're lead to believe that you've accomplished your goal... possibly. Be sure to look over our final thoughts, and if you haven't bought the game yet this may be a good time to jump on board so you can join the conversation. Trust us, it's worth it.

We're going to talk about what the ending means, and some readers are going to give their own opinions after playing the game through to completion. Spoilers? You betcha, so don't read until you've finished the game for yourself.

Was this a happy ending?

One gamer wrote in to say the ending didn't fit the rest of the game. "In such a bleak and dismal world, to suddenly be faced with the happy ending was too abrupt of a turnaround for me," he wrote. "There are some who would argue the possibility that the ending wasn't as happy as we would be lead to believe, and that she wasn't his sister, or that she was somehow corrupted by the world or some other idea like that, but the fact of the matter is we aren't shown that. We are simply shown the boy reuniting with the girl." He felt a sense of triumph, but he says he doesn't share the sense of awe that other gamers are reporting.

The big question remains, why was his sister there at all? Where did the game take place?

"I believe that the boy's journey through the forest, factory, and the area towards the end with the gravity effects was some sort of test and that his reward would be the reuniting with his sister," a reader told us. "When she sat up but didn't turn around at the end, I felt that either the boy was a ghost, or that they both were dead and needed to be together one more time before moving on to the afterlife. The crashing through the glass to me symbolized that he had escaped from the world we woke up in, and moved to a forest that was the last stop before heaven or hell."

There were hints, however, that the setting was physical, and a very real part of our own world. "The final screen looked to me like the protagonist approaching his sister, with a ladder just slightly out of reach to the far right," a reader pointed out. "First, I noticed the ladder is rotted away, next I noticed two clusters of flies buzzing around. [My] immediate thought was that the protagonist and sister were unable to discover a way up the ladder, and ultimately met their demise (starvation or otherwise) together at the bottom of the ladder." A fitting end to an already dark story? It's very possible.

Open-ended stories aren't rare, but Limbo refuses to give you much evidence one way or the other; you're left to your own devices when it comes to figuring out what's going on, and one answer is just as valid as the next. "When the main menu reappeared, I had the same feeling as I do when I wake up from a particularly interesting or exciting dream that got cut short... It doesn't even offer the opportunity to let you draw your own conclusions," a gamer told Ars. "There simply isn't enough evidence to explain it, and it's wholly mystifying. I adore it."

Is the boy trying to find his sister, or is he the one who is lost?

Here's another take on the ending, and one I didn't think of at all: the sister is alive. One gamer wrote in to say just that. "That ending though...they're both dead!? This would certainly explain the morbidity of the whole game, and the flies that followed the boy everywhere, and the maggots that jumped out and started eating his brain."

This is where it gets interesting. "Now that I think of it though, maybe it's just the boy that's dead? When he approaches his sister at the end she seems more startled than anything, and it's always bright where she is."

One e-mail summed everything up. "I think that on some level, trying to find a literal narrative 'meaning' to an ending like Limbo's is kind of a 'just for fun' thing." When you make the explanations too abstract, the power of the game begins to slip away, in other words. "It seems like the boy was dead at the beginning of the game, and the events of the game take place in limbo (appropriately) between life and death... Depending on how you look at it, you could either say he died and found the little girl in the afterlife, or that he woke up and found her alive," he wrote.

"I think the idea is that it doesn't matter though, as long as he found her."

When I noticed the people frantically attacking and setting up traps to kill the main character, I wondered if in the end I'd find out he was dead and some sort of monster (glowing eyes and all) and he didn't realize it. It might make sense if you look at the game in the sense that you aren't given much info and driven only by the fact that you're trying to get back to your sister. Sounds like monster logic to me. Single goal with nothing else, story element-wise peppered in.

I thought it was interesting how much scale was played with in the game. Like the 2 different hotel sign sizes, and mosquito sizes, giant bugs, etc. I don't know what it had to do with story, but it was very deliberate.

The girl being alive/boy dead seems to make the most sense. The first time you see the end, but are then taken by a brain slug, the scene is very calming, warm, and serene. This would indicate that the destination you are heading to is a pleasant place.

But, on the other hand, at the very end when you walk up behind the girl she reacts in a startled fashion, *and doesn't look at you* which indicated to me some sort of fear, either because you're a ghost, or some sort of monster sneaking up behind her.

I dunno, I just hope that after all the eggs are found (111%) that someone figures out a way to trigger a different ending.

When I first finished the final gravity level, and re-woke up again on the grass, I thought it looked very similar to the terrain of the FIRST level, and thought for a second that it was some kind of replay, or recursing level thing.

Then I saw the girl sitting there and thought the whole game could have been a dream sequence inside the boys head.

This may be anti-climactic to some people, but I believe that the whole game was simply just the boy's dream, and at the end, he got hit in the face by a splash of water. All along, his sister was fine, just playing in some other part of the woods, wasn't in danger, etc., and he had the dream that he did because he wasn't with her and he was scared. Sometimes kids have similar scary dreams when they begin to sleep alone for the first time, if they've slept in their parents' bed. As to the whole game, it may have been a product of his environment; what he experienced in the world when he was awake. If there are any questions about this; i.e. gravity switching, I'll explain that too, but giant spiders, giant mosquitoes, water, etc. sharp things (needles) all sound like things that kids would be afraid of. I think that this story is most similar to the "story" behind a recent "Cold War Kids" video called "Children" or Babies or something, without all the color that was in that video.

It doesn't seem as mysterious to me as it seems to be to other people, but again, that's my take. I also believe that it would be strange for Limbo to suddenly become so complicated in its storyline, as this game seems predicated on simplicity. It was an extremely enjoyable experience for me, and I truly do hope to see many sequels to this game, and possibly a slight bit of storyline, simply with different, nameless people experiencing their own "Limbo" in different environments, however, if it stays a "boy in search of girl" story, it would be pleasurable just the same.

fractalsphere wrote:

When I first finished the final gravity level, and re-woke up again on the grass, I thought it looked very similar to the terrain of the FIRST level, and thought for a second that it was some kind of replay, or recursing level thing.

Then I saw the girl sitting there and thought the whole game could have been a dream sequence inside the boys head.

Pointing out the improper use of homophones in the comments of other people must give you the respect online you don't get in you personal or professional life, so let me applaud you. We all knew what skull76 meant, but you repeated a small mistake and mocked him for it.

Well done, you've made the Internet a better place, and you get to lean back, take a sip of your coffee, and feel good about yourself. If only for a moment.

I wanted to play through again to look for clues, but I got the sense that the main character is running through a loop over and over stuck in limbo. At the end, you wake up in the same area which you start playing the game except that there's a girl there now. After crashing through the glass, he sits up in the same way that the game starts. There are other parts in the story where you see the girl, but then she disappears. So I got the feeling that there's a small bit of stuff after the credits start to roll which brings us right back to the very beginning of the game again.

I think there's also the question of how the boy got here in the first place. The description is that he's looking for his sister who he believes is stuck in limbo. How would you get there? I think that the boy committed suicide to go there, which is why there are background images of boys about his size hanging from a noose. He's either being tortured/reminded of the mistake he made or this environment is created from the elements surrounding his death and might be why he keeps dying from elements in the environment.

Pointing out the improper use of homophones in the comments of other people must give you the respect online you don't get in you personal or professional life, so let me applaud you. We all knew what skull76 meant, but you repeated a small mistake and mocked him for it.

Well done, you've made the Internet a better place, and you get to lean back, take a sip of your coffee, and feel good about yourself. If only for a moment.

What an ironic comment to make...

(Does that make my comment ironic, as well?)

Anyway, to clarify:

Pointing out the improper use of comment subject in the comments of other people must give you the respect online you don't get in you (sic) personal or professional life, so let me applaud you. We all knew what chem.em was thinking, but you repeated a small correction and mocked him for it.

Well done, you've made the Internet a better place, and you get to lean back, take a sip of your coffee, and feel good about yourself. If only for a moment.

Well done, you've made the Internet a better place, and you get to lean back, take a sip of your coffee, and feel good about yourself. If only for a moment.

People tend not to realize that their illiteracy might negatively impact others' perception of them. Personally, I'd rather have it pointed out in a comment thread than when communicating with a potential employer.

But of all the comments that the author of this article could reply to, you chose to pick a fight instead of participate in the actual conversation.

Well done, you've made the Internet a better place, and you get to lean back, take a sip of your coffee, and feel good about yourself. If only for a moment.

People tend not to realize that their illiteracy might negatively impact others' perception of them. Personally, I'd rather have it pointed out in a comment thread than when communicating with a potential employer.

But of all the comments that the author of this article could reply to, you chose to pick a fight instead of participate in the actual conversation.

Ben wasn't picking a fight. He was pointing out that chem.em was being a dick. Big difference.

Well done, you've made the Internet a better place, and you get to lean back, take a sip of your coffee, and feel good about yourself. If only for a moment.

People tend not to realize that their illiteracy might negatively impact others' perception of them. Personally, I'd rather have it pointed out in a comment thread than when communicating with a potential employer.

But of all the comments that the author of this article could reply to, you chose to pick a fight instead of participate in the actual conversation.

Ben wasn't picking a fight. He was pointing out that chem.em was being a dick. Big difference.

No. There's no difference.If people thought he was being a dick, that was their opinion.Pointing it out publicly made it a fight.That's why I (and I'm assuming Muriac as well) joined the fight.

Pointing out the improper use of homophones in the comments of other people must give you the respect online you don't get in you personal or professional life, so let me applaud you. We all knew what skull76 meant, but you repeated a small mistake and mocked him for it.

Well done, you've made the Internet a better place, and you get to lean back, take a sip of your coffee, and feel good about yourself. If only for a moment.

I, for one, don't think grammar corrections are useless pedantry, and I'd wager a pretty good deal of the Ars reader base agrees, given how often the writers are flogged by commenters for rather minor screwups and how often people correct each other's grammar in comments.

Grammar is important to communication (especially in English). Granted, in this case, the meaning of the comment was still fairly obvious, but far too many people think that an apostrophe must necessarily come before an 's' at the end of a word, for some reason, or that the apostrophe somehow denotes plurality, OR that, for something to be possessive, the apostrophe is required. Those can lead to egregious errors in interpretation, since it can make sentences pretty ambiguous (or at least hard to decipher).

Correcting someone can help them to learn the rule or at least otherwise avoid the particular mistake, in the future, if they take it to heart, which could make the difference between getting a job, getting into their dream college, getting chosen for a promotion, or not getting any of those things.

For the reasons of those chances and for clarity, it's worth it.If you don't like the corrections, don't comment on them. It's not worth your breath, because we're going to keep doing it, anyway.

I, for one, don't think grammar corrections are useless pedantry, and I'd wager a pretty good deal of the Ars reader base agrees, given how often the writers are flogged by commenters for rather minor screwups and how often people correct each other's grammar in comments.

I agree that obnoxious people don't mind being obnoxious. That's, you know, the problem. I also know you can't stop it, short of banning if the PG is violated. It's just interesting to see noise being celebrated.

And I know you're wrong about "a good deal" of the readership supporting posts that do nothing but mock spelling mistakes. Out of millions of readers a month only a few ever bring up minor spelling and grammar mistakes at all, much less post JUST to complain about a homophone being misused by another reader.

But by all means, continue to be "that guy." Wear the band's T-shirt to their concert. Loudly point out small mistakes during movies. Correct the professor during a lecture on a tiny matter. If you want to celebrate your own annoying-ness, it's your business.

All of the internet trolling (yes, I did go there) going on is really distracting us from a hopefully intelligent conversation about a really well done game.

I was personally very happy to play a game based on the minimalist graphics model. WoW, and SC2, and Mass Effect etc etc etc are all beautifully done, and certainly there is a place for those games to drive the threshold of graphics simulations, but a game like Limbo, taking us in almost an opposite direction (it wasn't deliberate 8-bit, but still), making such great use of foreground and background objects was really amazing to watch. It was enjoyable to just sit back and take it in, and some of the screens looked like charcoal sketches I'd hang in my house. Really beautifully done all around.

As for the deeper storyline, that's almost secondary to me. ;-) I need to go through and unlock achievements. I got 'wrong way'! ;-P

I, for one, don't think grammar corrections are useless pedantry, and I'd wager a pretty good deal of the Ars reader base agrees, given how often the writers are flogged by commenters for rather minor screwups and how often people correct each other's grammar in comments.

Grammar is important to communication (especially in English). Granted, in this case, the meaning of the comment was still fairly obvious, but far too many people think that an apostrophe must necessarily come before an 's' at the end of a word, for some reason, or that the apostrophe somehow denotes plurality, OR that, for something to be possessive, the apostrophe is required. Those can lead to egregious errors in interpretation, since it can make sentences pretty ambiguous (or at least hard to decipher).

Correcting someone can help them to learn the rule or at least otherwise avoid the particular mistake, in the future, if they take it to heart, which could make the difference between getting a job, getting into their dream college, getting chosen for a promotion, or not getting any of those things.

For the reasons of those chances and for clarity, it's worth it.If you don't like the corrections, don't comment on them. It's not worth your breath, because we're going to keep doing it, anyway.

Ben's right. You're wrong. Your grammar, sentence structure and punctuation can all use some work. Please take the faux pedantry somewhere else. You annoy me.

I, for one, don't think grammar corrections are useless pedantry, and I'd wager a pretty good deal of the Ars reader base agrees, given how often the writers are flogged by commenters for rather minor screwups and how often people correct each other's grammar in comments.

I agree that obnoxious people don't mind being obnoxious. That's, you know, the problem. I also know you can't stop it, short of banning if the PG is violated. It's just interesting to see noise being celebrated.

And I know you're wrong about "a good deal" of the readership supporting posts that do nothing but mock spelling mistakes. Out of millions of readers a month only a few ever bring up minor spelling and grammar mistakes at all, much less post JUST to complain about a homophone being misused by another reader.

But by all means, continue to be "that guy." Wear the band's T-shirt to their concert. Loudly point out small mistakes during movies. Correct the professor during a lecture on a tiny matter. If you want to celebrate your own annoying-ness, it's your business.

1. The "it's all a dream" theory seems plausible, but I don't know if it's an actual dream so much as the boy's real-world environment enhanced by his own fears and imagination. Somebody up above pointed out that the game has several elements that resonate with how kids see the world - giant spiders and mosquitos - but the game also has _other kids_, who attack the protagonist in the way that other kids might; they chase after him and attack him with blow guns. All the other traps and dangers in the game might be the imagined versions of otherwise mundane elements - I know I would play the "floor's made of lava!" game as a kid (and I believe there's an XKCD on that theme as well), and it's not hard to see just about everything else in the game as something similar - a mere puddle that becomes a bottomless lake if the kid "falls in", random spots of forest floor containing horrible bear traps, and otherwise grey and ordinary cities and factories turning into gigantic mazes.

Of course, that theory has to recognize that the game's still extraordinarily bleak and macabre - my imagination certainly never looked like that when I was a kid, and I suspect the same's true of most people. On the other hand, this kid may well not be ordinary, or even entirely sane. Note that literally everybody he runs into during the course of the game avoids him or actively tries to hurt him (with the exception of the sister), and he, in turn, hurts them back - he literally dismembers the spider, and crushes the kids with blow guns as they run through the pressure traps. In that case, it's easy to imagine the kid being a friendless outsider, teased by other kids, and the game as his imaginary world where he (eventually) overcomes all obstacles and destroys his enemies. In such a world, the sister is the only person who doesn't persecute him, and as such, she comes across as almost saintly, bathed in ethereal light and surrounded by flowers and butterflies.

2. My other working theory is that the kid's literally in Limbo - that is, an endless, grey world from which he's constantly trying to escape. The twist here is that I'm not sure it's possible for him to escape. IIRC, there's at least two places in the game, before the end, where it looks like you might be coming to the end - in the first, the boy approaches a figure sitting on the ground, but when he draws close the ground collapses from underneath him and the other figure ends up hanging by the neck from a rope, out of reach. In the second area, the boy approaches the sister, seeing her in pretty much the same setting as the end of the game. However, before the boy can reach her he's attacked by a parasite, and forced to walk away from her, into a long, dark detour.

That being the case, I gotta wonder if the ending means the boy is actually reunited with the sister, or whether he's merely drawing as close as he can without setting off another terrible accident that forces him away from her again. Consider the actual ending carefully: the boy doesn't actually interact with the sister, and though she stops playing with the flowers, she never actually turns to look at him. She remains in the light, he remains in the shadows. And even though he runs towards the sister after landing on the ground, he slows and stops as he draws near. We never see him try to get any closer than he is, even though there's a pause of a few seconds before we cut to credits where he could presumably move closer. So I think there's unquestionably ambiguity to the scene - you can certainly imagine that as soon as the credits cut in, he runs to her and they live happily ever after, but it's at least as plausible to me that, after everything, this is as good as it will ever get for the boy - he can stand in the shadows, just looking at the person he's gone through hell for, but never actually reach her. Given the tone of the rest of the game, I gotta say that I find that interpretation more thematically coherent, if far more tragic than most games.

Anyway, my $1.50 about the game. I'd like to take a moment to thank Ben and Ars for the recommendation, incidentally - I don't think I would have played it without their numerous mentions of it, but I found it to be a nice palette cleanser between Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Starcraft II. Cheers, and thanks for the recommendation, guys!

1. The "it's all a dream" theory seems plausible, but I don't know if it's an actual dream so much as the boy's real-world environment enhanced by his own fears and imagination. Somebody up above pointed out that the game has several elements that resonate with how kids see the world - giant spiders and mosquitos - but the game also has _other kids_, who attack the protagonist in the way that other kids might; they chase after him and attack him with blow guns. All the other traps and dangers in the game might be the imagined versions of otherwise mundane elements - I know I would play the "floor's made of lava!" game as a kid (and I believe there's an XKCD on that theme as well), and it's not hard to see just about everything else in the game as something similar - a mere puddle that becomes a bottomless lake if the kid "falls in", random spots of forest floor containing horrible bear traps, and otherwise grey and ordinary cities and factories turning into gigantic mazes.

Of course, that theory has to recognize that the game's still extraordinarily bleak and macabre - my imagination certainly never looked like that when I was a kid, and I suspect the same's true of most people. On the other hand, this kid may well not be ordinary, or even entirely sane. Note that literally everybody he runs into during the course of the game avoids him or actively tries to hurt him (with the exception of the sister), and he, in turn, hurts them back - he literally dismembers the spider, and crushes the kids with blow guns as they run through the pressure traps. In that case, it's easy to imagine the kid being a friendless outsider, teased by other kids, and the game as his imaginary world where he (eventually) overcomes all obstacles and destroys his enemies. In such a world, the sister is the only person who doesn't persecute him, and as such, she comes across as almost saintly, bathed in ethereal light and surrounded by flowers and butterflies.

2. My other working theory is that the kid's literally in Limbo - that is, an endless, grey world from which he's constantly trying to escape. The twist here is that I'm not sure it's possible for him to escape. IIRC, there's at least two places in the game, before the end, where it looks like you might be coming to the end - in the first, the boy approaches a figure sitting on the ground, but when he draws close the ground collapses from underneath him and the other figure ends up hanging by the neck from a rope, out of reach. In the second area, the boy approaches the sister, seeing her in pretty much the same setting as the end of the game. However, before the boy can reach her he's attacked by a parasite, and forced to walk away from her, into a long, dark detour.

That being the case, I gotta wonder if the ending means the boy is actually reunited with the sister, or whether he's merely drawing as close as he can without setting off another terrible accident that forces him away from her again. Consider the actual ending carefully: the boy doesn't actually interact with the sister, and though she stops playing with the flowers, she never actually turns to look at him. She remains in the light, he remains in the shadows. And even though he runs towards the sister after landing on the ground, he slows and stops as he draws near. We never see him try to get any closer than he is, even though there's a pause of a few seconds before we cut to credits where he could presumably move closer. So I think there's unquestionably ambiguity to the scene - you can certainly imagine that as soon as the credits cut in, he runs to her and they live happily ever after, but it's at least as plausible to me that, after everything, this is as good as it will ever get for the boy - he can stand in the shadows, just looking at the person he's gone through hell for, but never actually reach her. Given the tone of the rest of the game, I gotta say that I find that interpretation more thematically coherent, if far more tragic than most games.

Anyway, my $1.50 about the game. I'd like to take a moment to thank Ben and Ars for the recommendation, incidentally - I don't think I would have played it without their numerous mentions of it, but I found it to be a nice palette cleanser between Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Starcraft II. Cheers, and thanks for the recommendation, guys!

Great points. I like your second theory as well. Someone else made a post similar so I'll quote it and comment on both.

taraba wrote:

I wanted to play through again to look for clues, but I got the sense that the main character is running through a loop over and over stuck in limbo. At the end, you wake up in the same area which you start playing the game except that there's a girl there now. After crashing through the glass, he sits up in the same way that the game starts. There are other parts in the story where you see the girl, but then she disappears. So I got the feeling that there's a small bit of stuff after the credits start to roll which brings us right back to the very beginning of the game again.

I think there's also the question of how the boy got here in the first place. The description is that he's looking for his sister who he believes is stuck in limbo. How would you get there? I think that the boy committed suicide to go there, which is why there are background images of boys about his size hanging from a noose. He's either being tortured/reminded of the mistake he made or this environment is created from the elements surrounding his death and might be why he keeps dying from elements in the environment.

The suicide bit seems a bit morbid, but with the rest of the game's style, it's not out of the question. I like your theory, as well as the one previously quoted. Where you end up is quite similar to where you began, however, the landscape is different and, of course, the girl is now there. What that means raises many questions. I'd enjoy seeing more of what people think specifically about that ending.

If you take the Catholic definition of the Limbo of the Fathers as a place between Heaven and Hell where souls reside while waiting to be redeemed, then the game is the story of the boy's redemption.

Consider that in the game, to go downward is to enter darkness and death, while to go up is to enter light, and continuing life (Hell vs Heaven). Generally, there is an upwards progression in the game, suggested by brighter environments and an overall movement away from primitive and animalistic dangers towards more human and controllable ones.

Thus the end could be interpreted in two ways. Either the girl is a Christ figure who is there to guide him to Heaven, or he is redeemed by an unseen entity for finding his sister in Limbo. Also the fact that in the final scene as the credits roll, the ladder upwards is completely broken, suggesting that the boy's journey to a higher plane is his alone, and his path can't be followed by anyone else.

Also, people have been drawing comparisons between this game and Inception, based on the fact that they both use a concept of limbo, to suggest that the game world is a dream state. However, I think that the game is more reminiscent of What Dreams May Come. Admittedly that's a sloppy and mediocre movie and not one I would necessarily recommend watching, but it does have a lot more in common with Limbo than Inception does.

Also, arguing about spelling and grammar on the internet is like putting a chocolate ashtry on a motorbike. Kind of pointless when you think about it.

If you take the Catholic definition of the Limbo of the Fathers as a place between Heaven and Hell where souls reside while waiting to be redeemed, then the game is the story of the boy's redemption.

Consider that in the game, to go downward is to enter darkness and death, while to go up is to enter light, and continuing life (Hell vs Heaven). Generally, there is an upwards progression in the game, suggested by brighter environments and an overall movement away from primitive and animalistic dangers towards more human and controllable ones.

Thus the end could be interpreted in two ways. Either the girl is a Christ figure who is there to guide him to Heaven, or he is redeemed by an unseen entity for finding his sister in Limbo. Also the fact that in the final scene as the credits roll, the ladder upwards is completely broken, suggesting that the boy's journey to a higher plane is his alone, and his path can't be followed by anyone else.

Also, people have been drawing comparisons between this game and Inception, based on the fact that they both use a concept of limbo, to suggest that the game world is a dream state. However, I think that the game is more reminiscent of What Dreams May Come. Admittedly that's a sloppy and mediocre movie and not one I would necessarily recommend watching, but it does have a lot more in common with Limbo than Inception does.

Also, arguing about spelling and grammar on the internet is like putting a chocolate ashtry on a motorbike. Kind of pointless when you think about it.

Interesting stuff. I would not consider myself a catholic, so I'm thinking through your comment. Also going to check out the movie you mentioned. I'd say that "Limbo" and "Inception" are similar on a technical level, in the sense that once you get into the details of the dream state and what dream states generally are/mean for the person dreaming, you can find similarities, but I also don't find many similarities beyond the general topic that the game and the movie touch on.

On Another Note: I really do hope that trolling didn't kill this thread. Ben, your comments were worthless in relation to the article you wrote, and did nothing to serve the discussion. You should try to ignore shit that you don't like in the future unless it's related specifically to the subject matter you wrote about/the subject matter of another thread.

As for the grammar issue, the person who pointed out the error was not wrong in doing so. Their approach and word usage when pointing out the error may have been abrasive, but essentially, their comment could only be constructive and used as something to learn from. Their comment may not have seemed necessary to some people, but if another website referencing to ArsTechnica's growing popularity were to call it AssTechnical or if the creators of Limbo were to be reading this article, and saw that the title of it was "Limbo Ending:, What It Mean?" , I have no reason to doubt that someone from ArsTechnica would have liked that to have been pointed out, especially if they wanted to be seen as someone who took the writing of their articles and, in general, their job, seriously. I mean, if we don't give a damn about grammar, since it's such an annoyance, why not just forget about it. For that matter, lets all start TyPiNG lYk3 DiS DuDZ, because it's cool and no one likes an asshole that goes against cool, do they. I'd agree with Dud21e@ in saying that arguing about the grammar issue was and would continue to be pointless if it continued to occur.

If you take the Catholic definition of the Limbo of the Fathers as a place between Heaven and Hell where souls reside while waiting to be redeemed, then the game is the story of the boy's redemption.

I'm not an expert of catholic theology, but in Dante, which I think is by far the most influential source for modern images of afterlife, the Limbo was indeed a part of the Inferno (Hell) where those who where not sinners, but not baptized either (whether pagans or stillborn children) stayed. There they would be deprived of God's light, but apart from that where free from the punishments administered in the rest of Hell. This image seems to adapt better also to the context of the game.By the way, it seems a pity that Limbo is only for xbox... any other platform (i.e. PC) in the foreseeable future?p.s. I'm sorry but on the grammar issue (excuse in advance my errors, because it is not my own language) I disagree with Ben. If anything, pointing out an error is less disrupting than pointing out the act of pointing out itself.

My interpretation while playing the game was that it was all a dream. That was how I felt while playing it, and when I saw the ending it was the only thing that seemed to fit to me. Especially with the brain slug bits. There are times in dreams in which you seem unable to control yourself, sometimes moving slow, sometimes running away from what you want to go towards, other times running towards your own doom. I also noticed that you 'wake up' in the exact same place as the game begins.

All in all I don't think it was worth it. Most of the games puzzles seemed to be solved by simply backtracking, and those that didn't weren't usually challenging so much as trial and death. The fact that the game was constantly introducing new typse of puzzles meant you never got to learn the game so everything was simply a matter of figuring out the rules so that you could survive. The only thing that I learned early in the game that stuck with me for the rest of the time was that if there doesn't seem to be a solution then backtrack. Between that, the lack of plot beyond a rudimentary 'stuff happens, fill in the blanks on your own', and the fact that the hidden items throughout the game serve absolutely no purpose other than to raise your % completed just makes things largely disappointing to me.

I know this topic was on the games plot, but I don't really understand the appeal. The game starts with nothing happening, the middle of the game is full of random stuff that is mostly unrelated, and the end of the game fulfills an undefined goal without actually resolving any of the games questions.

Having everything covered in shadows, and using puzzles as gameplay mechanism does not make a game art. I really feel that this game does nothing noteworthy beyond some cool visuals. It seems to me that having cool visuals and puzzle based gameplay with no plot causes people to climb all over themselves lavishing praise on the game.

I loved Braid, but Limbo, while fun at points, really just disappointed me.

EDIT:The biggest reason Braid impressed me was not just because it had plot, but the way in which the levels reflected the books (plot) associated with it. The gameplay actually had a meaning beyond "hey, cool".

The only thing I would infer from the level layout in Limbo is that technology is evil. The game seems to become darker and more dangerous as the game progresses, and at the same time the levels become mroe and more technologically founded, from forest to city to technological to simply a factory. Only when the character leaves this all behind does he find what he's looking for.

I think that's a stupid interpretation, but that's all I can come up with. It doesn't even make sense because the most menacing things in the game (spider and evil humans) come early in the game, in the forest. Maybe they're trying to stop you from advancing to technology?

The layout of the levels, and the puzzles they used reflected nothing. If anyone has any interpretation (other than my dumb one) I'd be interested in hearing it.